AI Boom Reshapes Korea's Markets as SK Hynix Dethrones Samsung After 27 Years

There is a quiet drama playing out in South Korean equity markets, and it says as much about the AI revolution as any quarterly earnings call ever could. For the first time since 1999, Samsung Electronics is no longer the country’s most valuable listed company — at least not for the entire trading day.

IT-NEWS, June 22 — The global AI investment frenzy has reshuffled the pecking order on Korea’s stock exchange. During intraday trading on June 22, SK Hynix briefly claimed the top spot with a market capitalization of 2,090 trillion won (approximately 9.29 trillion yuan at current exchange rates), edging past Samsung Electronics at 2,088 trillion won, according to a Chosun report. By the time IT-NEWS filed this story, Samsung had regained a slim lead, but the psychological barrier had already been broken.

Samsung Electronics had occupied the throne of Korea’s blue-chip market as the undisputed heavyweight since 1999 — a 27-year streak that seemed unassailable. That it has now been challenged, even momentarily, is a direct consequence of the explosive growth in artificial intelligence and the semiconductor super-cycle it has ignited. Global AI investments have sent chip prices soaring and profits at both Samsung and SK Hynix climbing at a blistering pace.

But the two companies earn their money very differently, and that difference is what tipped the scales. Samsung is a sprawling conglomerate with hands in smartphones, home appliances, and displays, whereas SK Hynix is a pure-play memory chip specialist. More to the point, SK Hynix was first to develop and mass-produce high-bandwidth memory (HBM) — the ultra-fast DRAM that sits at the heart of NVIDIA’s AI accelerators — giving it a lead over Samsung and Micron in the semiconductor industry’s most coveted product category.

That lead has translated into radically different stock trajectories. Over the past twelve months, Samsung shares have risen roughly 480 percent. Impressive, until you look at SK Hynix, which has surged more than 920 percent in the same window. In June of last year, SK Hynix was valued at just 187 trillion won. A year later, it has crossed the 2,000 trillion won threshold.

The company is not slowing down. SK Hynix plans to list American Depositary Receipts (ADRs) in the United States later this year, having filed an F-1 registration statement with the SEC in March — a move that would open the stock to a far broader pool of global capital.

Analysts are not convinced the rally is over. Kim Dong-won, head of research at KB Securities, argued that as the AI agent market expands from the cloud into PCs, smartphones, and edge devices, demand for the entire spectrum of memory products — HBM, server DRAM, enterprise SSDs — will enter an accelerated growth phase. He projects SK Hynix shares could reach 380,000 won, up from the current level of roughly 290,000 won.

Kim also forecast that SK Hynix will report second-quarter operating profit of 69 trillion won (approximately 306.8 billion yuan), a staggering 7.5-fold increase year-on-year, with an industry-leading operating margin of 77.2 percent — a result that would blow past consensus estimates.

Whether SK Hynix can hold onto the crown remains an open question. Samsung is hardly standing still: it is aggressively expanding its own HBM capacity and working to restore the competitiveness of its foundry business. The market consensus holds that Samsung shares have more room to run as well. The two companies are now locked in a genuine contest for market-cap supremacy, and that contest, like the AI arms race that fuels it, is only just beginning.